Home Assistant is turning 8 years this week. To celebrate we have launched crowdfunding campaign for Home Assistant Amber, a device for both beginners and home automation enthusiasts and the easiest way to get started with Home Assistant.
For more info see https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-amber
Whenever I buy smart-home stuff I first check if it is supported by HA. (So no more Kasa, and Nest was a huge compromise, I'm thinking there is a place for HA to make a [OpenTherm] Thermostat, like you made the P1 smartreader ["SlimmeLezer", reads energy and gas usage in the Netherlands]). The new Energy dashboard is extremely cool and useful and it's making a difference.
I love what you are doing and it's making Home Automation/IoT a better place. It is how Home Automation should be, with privacy and local control as founding principles. Keep it up.
Edit: Amber looks great! M.2 nice! I thought you were all about Odroid internally, so I'm a bit surprised it has a Pi compute module, I like that though. What drove that decision? Maybe you can go on the Self-Hosted podcast [0] again and talk about Amber, I enjoyed the previous interview [1] :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277
To the point that they will threaten to relicense their own software: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...
And when they ask about it: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-addi...
It gets delisted.
As the author of FOSS tools, I have worked to make sure things I have developed get packaged and used, and I have even spent a fair amount of time helping others to port it to their systems, even if it does nothing to help my use case. Frankly, seeing tsuch a hostile stance towards redistribution makes me wary of using it.
The gist is that NixOS has some weird dependency management that overrides Home Assistant's in a way that makes HA on NixOS a unique experience. And NixOS is not done repackaging HA, so it is in an unfinished state that only advanced users should attempt. ThIS will inevitably confuse users. Those users will then go to HA for support and will be unable to get it. HA doesn't want to support that and was pretty clear about it. Then this Jorg person got all up in arms and threw a hiss fit all over the internet and everybody got tense.
The NixOS also offered several ways to prevent just "go[ing] to HA for support and will be unable to get it":
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...
Also, if you look, the HA dev has the same complaint about Fedora:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...
So it is not just NixOS's "weird dependency management".
The threat to relicense the software came after the NixOS devs offering several ways to prevent more burden, and after the HA dev discovered Fedora packages it too:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86... (Feel free to scroll up from here to find the other two linked comments)
In other words, NixOS does what every other distro do and package every dependency required to run the application beforehand. HA devs appear to be claiming in almost every single one of the linked discussions that the Nix package is broken, but I can't find them pointing to any concrete evidence or specifics. I doubt they have any, because they can't have tried it out in a matter of few hours.
> And NixOS is not done repackaging HA
HA devs appears to be making a whole point out of this too, but it's quite overblown considering that the example being listed is a dependency that was introduced only days prior [1].
> HA doesn't want to support that and was pretty clear about it.
Did you see the Nix devs' proposal early on about requiring users to set the option `config.ambee.acceptThatThisPackageIsNotSupportedByUpstreamDevelopersAndIWillGoToNixpkgsToReportAnyIssues = true` [2] in order to be able to use the package? That was met with immediate hostility from HA devs.
> Then this Jorg person got all up in arms and threw a hiss fit all over the internet and everybody got tense.
That's likely not the impression people get from looking at any of the mentioned links, which is presumably why the prior HN thread mentioned in GP seems to have blown up. If anything, it makes me think twice about using HA myself because I fear this is the standard response I'd get from HA devs if I ever dare file an issue.
[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126319#issuecomment-86...
[2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...
I did see that but it's somewhat irrelevant because the person that would know what that means would already know where to ask the right question. And the person that has no idea what they're doing would just type 'true' and not know why. I'm in the latter camp btw. Things have to be mostly idiot proof for me. When they're not I'm going to ask questions where I think the most experts are. If I have a problem with HA, I dont care where I got it from or what configs I had to do surgery on, I'm gonna post my question in the HA forums.
To be clear if I was trying to use HA on NixOs at this very moment, I would have no idea what questions are appropriate where except that my problem is with HA so thats where I'd ask it.
> That's likely not the impression people get from looking at any of the mentioned links
We're all different, but as a person ignorant of NixOs and HA, it's the impression I came away with.
How can people not know where to ask questions when all the people who'd ask has been told exactly where in a single short English sentence? What's not clear about "accept that this package is not supported by upstream developers and I will go to Nixpkgs to report any issues"?
> it's the impression I came away with
It's not a reasonable one on two counts. Let's go over the statement again:
> Then this Jorg person got all up in arms and threw a hiss fit all over the internet and everybody got tense.
First, he did not appear "all over the internet." The are only two places where I can find him discussing the topic online: in the Nixpkgs GitHub issue and a single Home Assistant thread where he sought to get clarifications from upstream regarding licensing policies.
Second, that he "threw a hiss fit" is taking your imagination to a real stretch. In no single comment did he express anger or frustration. All he ever did in his very few comments was 1. decline to drop the package from Nixpkgs and 2. ask about Home Assistant licensing. Take that in contrast with the behavior of HA devs where almost every single comment in the linked threads is provocative, sarcastic, and condescending, making evidence-free claims of incompetence and breakage at every step of the way right from the start.
I will answer this, though, because its happened to me a thousand times: > How can people not know where to ask questions when all the people who'd ask has been told exactly where in a single short English sentence? What's not clear about "accept that this package is not supported by upstream developers and I will go to Nixpkgs to report any issues"?
I install HA on NixOS and everything seems to work perfectly and I'm happy. I buy the latest, just released Phillips Hue light and try to connect it and can't get it connected. I go to HA to try and troubleshoot ( because thats what I'm using and where this question is most relevant). HA devs tell me I'm missing a dependency and to pip it in or add it or however it normally works. I can't on NixOS and start collecting weird exception messages. In the end, HA devs spend hours wondering wtf is going on with my system until they realize it's NixOS and doesn't work the way they expect it to. I've now wasted their time unintentionally and had no idea it was actually an issue related to packaging I should have been asking about in NixOS - who are totally unaware of the trouble being caused to HA. That's just how the real world works.
It looks like you get:
* Zigbee module ($45 for rp4 https://phoscon.de/en/raspbee2)
* PoE module ($20 if desired for rp4 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14882)
* M.2 Slot (but no SD card slot)
* battery powered RTC
* A case
It's priced at $149 with all that, whereas rp4 2GB w. zigbee and PoE would be $45 + $45 + $20 = $110, so price seems reasonable if you need all those things as you're getting the rtc, m.2 and case all in a nice package.
My use would probably only need the Zigbee module and I can 3D print a case, so I'd go with the rp4 especially as I have a bunch lying around anyway! But Seems like a really nice package if you need all those things, and especially PoE is nice to have built in.
I'm guessing largely the "for beginners" part in the description. That and people who lack time or for other reasons want something working out-of-the-box?
The Zigbee module is the main place that support will be better
Otherwise, it looks like a pretty decent package, though.
Any chance declarative configuration (tank or any other format) will be getting a second chance? Like many here it’s the one way of working with HASS that feels/felt nice.
Now I feel that it would take me days to recreate the configurations that I needed to make with the UI.
Deprecating yaml is bad for configuration versioning.
I feel like you're missing an opportunity by launching this as a DIY type device. That market segment can already cater for themselves with a Raspberry pi etc..
You've made big leaps with the Config Flow system, I feel like the time is right to launch a fully polished device. Cater for the people who don't want to ever see the PCB, they're tech savy but want a pretty device to sit on the mantle piece with a GUI that just works.
I'm very excited about this device. I've been using Smartthings and then IKEAs gateway, but haven't been happy with their performance and features.
Also, Z-Wave licensing is an absolute nightmare, and significantly expensive.
They have a great amount of hardware already available and lots of knowledge to accelerate and cheapen your roadmap.... If you are willing to share the design of course.
I’m unsure of the maintainers motives, I’m also unclear on whether they’re even a hass core developer, but I don’t really care enough to read more either.
The best/easiest way to run it is to use Docker. They have a script that will set it up for you. After that, the container can basically self update and self manage. Any addons that you want to use are installed as separate docker containers that talk to the main home assistant container. It's super seamless and easy.
In my case, I just setup a barebones Debian VM and ran their setup script. It took care of all the Docker stuff and got it up and running.